EA: “If We Ban You in the Forums, You Would Be Banned from the Game as Well”

In a new low for the game software company Electronic Arts, EA is instituting a new policy: if you get banned from their online forum, you get banned from any EA game you bought that uses the same log in.

EA is tying your forum accounts to your game access accounts, so if you post something in their forum that any moderator disagrees with or “believes” violates their ToS, then when you are banned from the forum, you won’t be able to play your newly purchased Command and Conquer 3 or SPORE. It is unclear if this will prevent you from playing the game at all, or just any online component of the game; however, with more and more games requiring Internet activation to even install them, it is entirely conceivable that even single-player games will be unplayable if EA bans you from their forums.

Nothing on EA’s site mentions the criteria used for banning forum users.

It should be noted that this comes on the heels of the big uproar of EA’s implementation of DRM in SPORE. They constantly argue that the DRM is to prevent piracy, but that just isn’t true in the least. So now they evolve from their draconian implementation of DRM to banning customers from the games they buy if they post something that EA’s forum moderators don’t agree with.

What would happen if other companies did this? If you say something crappy about Ford, then your car won’t turn on the next time you get in it? You curse about the crappy GE mixer, and your refrigerator and microwave turn off? You swear when you loose a signal under a bridge, and your whole family’s cellphones stop working? My God, don’t cross the city services, or you might not have water or trash service. This has a lot in common with the anti-government regulations in countries like China, North Korea, Iran, or the anti-religious tenants of true Islam.

Here is the post (it is the 10th post down from the top) from the EA forum detailing the new policy. It is written by eaapoc and posted on October 18, 2008 at 2:03AM

Well, its actually going to be a bit nastier for those who get banned.

Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you’d actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It’s all one in the same, so I strongly reccommend people play nice and act mature.

All in all, we expect people to come on here and abide by our ToS. We hate banning people, it makes our lives a lot tougher, but its what we have to do.

Those banned will stay banned, but like most other internet services, its not that hard to create a new fake e-mail account. However, its a lot harder to get a new serial key =)